by Theo Dorgan

All day I have been sorting keepsakes,
sorting and sifting, selecting —
feather, bird–bone, leaf and root,
a scrap of bright stuff from a dress,
a stone, a shell — evidences,
inconsequential things,
laid out around me in haphazard rings.

Now is the gathering, as night
is gathering in, the making of heaps —
like with unlike or like, all happy
guess and intuition, my hand
picking and placing, the rapt
absorption of a child, you’d say,
circling the circling of his own attention.

And now it’s done as the moon,
a day off the full, rides over the houses.
I spark a discreet blaze in the back yard,
well–seasoned ash, February’s cut,
and into the cast iron pot, first gift
you gave me, I cast my two dozen
memories, a memory for every year

we’ve walked this earth together.
Now we add water to the scorch, drawn
from that rock–cleft in the Aetheros
high up in the piney woods,
brought carefully home in a sealed flask.
Now the reducing, the boiling down,
and now the distilling to essence

and finally, drawn through the crystal coils,
the sweet drops I hold in this glass flask.
You will stretch out beside me under Belfast

lights and hold me in your look. Here is distillate
to make our eyes dilate, a drop on each tongue
and then the kiss — and then, if you will,
the old, dancing climb into the familiar stars.

by Michael Durack

Ceaseless sweep of big muddy water,
carry the soul of Magnolia State,
spirit of forest and cotton field,
soul of Caucasian, Negro, Choctaw;
spirit of Jackson, Natchez, Starkville,
borne by dugout and paddle–steamer
past bluff and levee and delta silt
down to the Gulf of Mexico.

And, spirit of Shannon, wend and surge
by long meadow and royal fort;
glide underneath the white bird’s hill,
and carry a tale of Si and Árd Ri,
of Norse and Norman, of Gael and Gall
with barge and cruiser and sailing skiff
past Diarmuid and Gráinne’s silken bed
to the yawning sea by Lovers’ Leap.

Beneath white horses of boundless ocean
currents course, eddy and mingle —
waters of Clare and cool Tipperary
caressing the tide of warm Mississippi
ferried by Gulf Stream and Atlantic Drift.

by Eileen Sheehan

i.m Maurice J. Reidy, poet
No matter what we write, our rivers will insist
on flowing downhill; sand will infiltrate
our sandwiches and the years will grow
age–spots on our skin. All this, too,
is extraordinary. I tell you how

my father knew a poet who made water
climb a tree, not in a poem but in his own
backyard. A man who utilised
whatever was at hand to build a contraption
that drew water up a sycamore,

harnessing gravity flow to a tap
in his cottage scullery. You point
a little further down the strand to where
children squeal as the dead crab they picked
an hour ago suddenly takes legs across the sand.

Our laughter at its sideways break
for freedom weakens our resolve
to solve the mysteries of what is wondrous,
what is not. Our talk trails off; our thoughts
lie down before us, take the sun.

by Eileen Sheehan

he kisses you
tastes your loneliness

sings you a song
both beautiful and sad

he kisses you
tastes salt on your tongue

thinks he has healed you
when all he has done

is to agitate
the black ice in your heart

and he kisses you